The reference is, of course, to the former hedge-fund manager (andformer supporter of liberal causes like gun control) Anthony Scaramucci, who last week was appointed White House communications director despite, or because of, having no experience with media or communications other than having granted interviews to reporters. He’s known familiarly, if not always approvingly, as “the Mooch.” “Reince” is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee.

Anthony Scaramucci, July 21, 2017: “I love the president and I’m very, very loyal to the president.” In 2015 he called Trump a “hack” and a “bully.” Via Business Insider.

Popinjay is a wonderful old word and a memorable descriptor for the slick, effusive Scaramucci. For the last 500 years or so it’s meant “a vain, conceited, shallow, talkative person,” although its original definition was neutral and zoological.

May 16, 2014

Are city slogans obsolete? Cleveland, Ohio, recently announced that it would phase out its famous slogan, “Cleveland Rocks,” in favor of “This Is Cleveland”—which isn’t a slogan at all, its creators insist, but rather “a repository” and “a collection of stories.”

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Slogans That Never Sleep: How to Brand a City,” reviews the history of city slogans, which traditionally have served to boost tourism and rally civic spirit, and explains the distinctions between city slogans, city mottoes (like London’s Domine dirige nos—“God direct us”), and city nicknames (like New York’s “The City That Never Sleeps” and “The Big Apple”).

In the past, cities and towns (or the largest employer therein) often sponsored civic slogan contests. In a 1911 contest, Modesto, California, chose an immodest but lyrical city slogan: “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health.” (The prize: $3.) That slogan, now considered unofficial, still adorns a downtown arch. A 1929 contest produced “The Biggest Little City in the World,” the long-lasting slogan of Reno, Nevada. (The winner, one G.A. Burns of Sacramento, received $100.) That slogan, too, appears on a downtown arch.

Real-estate developers tried their hand at sloganeering as well. In 1925 Jacob Ruppert, who owned the New York Yankees from 1915 to 1939, bought a swath of swampy real estate in Florida adjoining the team’s spring-training field. He dubbed the property Ruppert Beach and gave it the long-winded slogan “Where Every Breath Brings Added Health and Every Moment Pleasure.” Unfortunately, in September 1926 a massive hurricane struck the region. Ruppert Beach was never built.

Tales of the Cities (one of my earliest posts, published in June 2006, about the focus-group death of an Indianapolis city slogan)

And if it’s state tourism slogans that interest you, the New York Times’s Gail Collins devoted a column to them yesterday. Idaho, for example, recently dropped its “Great Potatoes” in favor of “Adventures in Living” after conducting some “attitude research.” Collins observes: “Well yeah, when you hire people to do a marketing survey, they are not going to come back with a root vegetable.” Check the comments for readers’ contributions (example: “New Orleans: We’re Here Because We’re Not All There”).

The smallest of the world’s dog breeds was chosen over four other finalists in a “Name The Team” contest that garnered over 5,000 submissions, triumphing over Aardvarks, Buckaroos, Desert Gators and Sun Dogs. …

El Paso general manager Brad Taylor said Chihuahuas was chosen as the team name because they “represent fun and are fiercely loyal.” The region’s fans were able to submit names through the team’s website. The list was narrowed based on creativity, marketability, fun, relevance to El Paso’s unique character and the ability to trademark the name.

“El Pasoans played a significant role in identifying our new team name – they attended focus groups, suggested several hundred different names, and voted in record numbers for all the names,” said Alan Ledford, president of MountainStar Sports Group.

¡Ay, chihuahua! Just because they crowdsourced the name doesn’t mean the whole crowd approves. “What a complete slap in the face to all of us El Pasoans!!!” lamented Scott Ziegler in a comment to the MiLB article. “#Padres must be thinking it will motivate players to get to the Majors quickly,” tweet-snorted Kenneth Dame. As of yesterday afternoon, more than 8,000 people had signed a Change.org petition asking MountainStar Sports Group to “not only strongly reconsider the name of our city's baseball team, but allow our taxpayers to vote on the final name, not just simply ‘recommend’ ideas for the name.”

Here’s my own dos pesos: A polarizing name—even a negative name—can make a strong brand. And “Chihuahuas” scores well compared to some other baseball-team names. Padres? Sexist and faithist! Indians? Racist! Two major-league teams are named for socks. Socks! (I do, however, tip my cap to the Amsterdam-Gloversville-Johnstown Hyphens.) By contrast, the association of Chihuahuas with “small and feisty”—feisty comes from feist, “a small, belligerent dog”—seems appropriate and engaging.

September 23, 2013

909er: A resident of Southern California’s Inland Empire, classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area. The numeral refers to one of the region’s area codes; in 2004, the western part of Riverside County was split off and assigned a new area code, 951.

For years, a stubborn divide between youth in Orange County's beach communities and those who visit from the inland has been summed up in the term ‘909ers,’ a less-than-flattering reference to an Inland Empire area code that — in beach slang — has come to mean anybody east of the county line.

Its popularity has waxed and waned but resurfaced with a vengeance in the aftermath of the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach in July.

When the weeklong event ended in a chaotic night of broken windows, street fights and a mess of tossed food, word that 909ers were to blame spread quickly among locals, despite the fact that only three of the 12 adults arrested were from the Inland Empire. The rest were from Orange County, San Gabriel Valley and Ventura.

The 909 area code was created in 1992 and “quickly gained a negative reputation,” according to the Times’s Paloma Esquivel: “ ‘The 909’ was used on TV shows and by comedians as shorthand for a low-class community.”

Area-code shorthand is popular in Southern California and can mystify outsiders. Times reporter Esquivel interviewed one 43-year-old man who hadn’t quite assimilated:

He said he moved to Huntington Beach from Las Vegas and was perplexed by the way locals use ‘909ers.’

“Area codes — I’m new to that,” he said. “It’s so weird in California you’re defined by the area code you’re from. It’s ridiculous.”

The earliest Urban Dictionary citation for “909er” is from 2003; it says, succinctly: “trashy riverside [sic] people.” Other Urban Dictionary definitions include “white trash,” “hayseeds,” and “worthless idiots, pure and simple.” As with many terms originally intended as slurs, the “909er” label can also be worn with pride, as in this UD counter-definition: “A Term Used By Snobby Little White Kids To Describe Us Good Ghetto Folk.”

Numerical-code branding has been used to more positive effect in Chicago, which earlier this year renamed a public walkway “The 606,” from the first three digits of Chicago’s ZIP codes. [Thanks to commenter David for the correction.]

Similar in sound but unrelated etymologically to “909er” (although in some cases there may be overlap): “99ers”—people who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.

May 23, 2013

During the lead-up to D-Day—June 6, 1944—the Allied nations undertook an elaborate deception strategy designed to mislead the Germans about the real date and location of the Normandy invasion. The overall plan was called Operation Bodyguard; one of its more bizarre elements—the creation of a decoy army, complete with inflatable tanks and fake artillery—had the code name Operation Fortitude.

The choice of code name for this particular operation—the crux of Bodyguard—was much debated. [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill had given instructions that no code name should be selected that might seem flippant in retrospect or give a hint of the individual or action involved. But he also disliked code names that meant nothing at all, which is why the original choice, “Mespot,” was rejected. Also vetoed were “Bulldog,” “Swordhilt,” “Axehead,” “Tempest,” and, obscurely, “Lignite.” Finally, a name was selected that seemed to evoke the resolution required to pull it off: Operation Fortitude.

The story of Operation Fortitude is told in a new documentary by Rick Beyer, “The Ghost Army,” that had its premiere Tuesday night on PBS. (Repeat broadcasts are scheduled throughout the week.)

It wasn’t only the operations that were deliberately named. The code names of the double agents who worked for MI5, the British intelligence agency, were also chosen with care and a hefty dash of dry humor. Dusko Popov, for example, a risk-loving Serbian playboy, was dubbed “Agent Tricycle.”

Macintyre explains:

This may have been, in part, a reference to Popov’s insatiable appetites and his reputed but probably apocryphal taste for three-in-a-bed sex. It also recognized that the Tricycle network now consisted of one big wheel—Popov—supported by two smaller ones, Agents Balloon and Gelatine.

The Americans took a different approach to code names. When Popov came to Washington in 1941 on an assignment from MI5, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded foreign spies as “just another species of criminal,” was not amused. “The FBI did not go in for jocular code names,” Macintyre tells us. “Popov was ‘Confidential Informant ND 63,’ an austere title that aptly reflects the bureau’s chilly attitude.”

April 05, 2013

For reasons best left undisclosed*, I recently found myself looking up facts about California cities. I wasn’t searching for nicknames or mottoes, but somehow I ended up on Wikipedia’s List of City Nicknames in California, and … well, there went the afternoon.

The list doesn’t include one city nickname I’ve always liked: Manteca, in Central California, is known as Fat City. (Manteca is Spanish for “cooking fat.”) But it does contain plenty of nuggets, many of them new to me (a California native). I learned, for example, that Chatsworth, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, is sometimes called San Pornando, and that San Francisco has more nicknames (ten) than any other California city.

Then there are all the “X of the world” cities and towns. A lot of them.

I’d known, of course, that Castroville is the Artichoke Center of the World and that Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World; indeed, I’ve attended the Artichoke Festival and the Garlic Festival. But some of the other world capitals surprised me:

Fallbrook: Avocado Capital of the World and Raisin Capital of the World. (But also see Selma, below.)

Forestville: Poison Oak Capital of the World. (Hey, I’ve been to Forestville. It ain’t that bad!)

Holtville: Carrot Capital of the World. (I had to look up Holtville on a map. It’s a town of about 6,000 in Imperial County, about 10 miles east of El Centro.)

Indio: Date Capital of the World. (I have fond memories of spring vacations in Indio. It’s in the hot, dry Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs on the map but worlds away in style. We’d always stop at Shields Date Gardens to order date shakes and watch a grainy black-and-white documentary called The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.)

Willow Creek: Bigfoot Capital of the world. (Had to look this one up, too. It’s in Humboldt County, near the Trinity River. Population about 1,000.)

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I understand the inclination toward superlatives, but where city mottoes are concerned, I prefer the poetic: Modesto’s sublime “Water Wealth Contentment Health,” Del Mar’s much-imitated “Where the Turf Meets the Surf,” Redwood City’s briskly reassuring “Climate Best by Government Test.”

I’m drawn to dark mottoes, too, like San Francisco’s “The City That Waits to Die.” But no California city beats Colma, just south of San Francisco, which Wikipedia reminds us was “founded as a necropolis in 1924.” One of Colma’s mottoes is “It’s Good to Be Alive in Colma”; it’s also known as “The City of the Silent” and as “The City That Waits for ‘The City That Waits to Die’ to Die.”

Another sadder-but-wiser tale: How not to name your restaurant. Author David Lizerbram, a trademark lawyer, leads off the story by observing: “It’s always astonishing to me that businesses will invest countless dollars in every aspect of their operations while relying on a name that will only bring legal issues.” Hear, hear!

If you’re launching a fashion brand, should you follow the traditional route and name it after yourself (which worked fine for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Betsey Johnson)? Or should you follow the lead of some younger designers and choose a quirky name like Creatures of the Wind? Mark Prus, guest-blogging for Duets Blog, weighs the costs and benefits of “strange” as a naming strategy.

The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you ‘The Tawny One’, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert’.”